| View This is a relatively short work in progress paper that introduces the idea of using proximity to a display as an implicit interaction technique in whiteboards.
Ju, W. G., Lee, B. A., and Klemmer, S. R. 2007. Range: exploring proxemics in collaborative whiteboard interaction. In CHI '07 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 2483-2488. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240866.1241028
Using relative location to display as an implicit interaction technique is heating up.
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A very well written paper with a good literature overview of public display work. The authors build an interaction framework for public displays with 4 phases: Ambient Display, Implicit Interaction, Subtle Interaction, and Personal Interaction. They also provide a series of design principles for building public ambient displays: Calm Aesthetics, Comprehension, Notification, Short-Duration Fluid Interaction, Immediate Usability, Shared Use, Combining Public and Personal Information, and Privacy.
They present a prototype ambient display system where gestures are used to interact with the display, both as a method of allowing users to transition from different states in the interaction framework, and "personally interacting with the display". They performed a simple evaluation of their display, and found people were able to use it.
Vogel, D. and Balakrishnan, R. 2004. Interactive public ambient displays: transitioning from implicit to explicit, public to personal, interaction with multiple users. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (Santa Fe, NM, USA, October 24 - 27, 2004). UIST '04. ACM, New York, NY, 137-146. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1029632.1029656
The main take-aways of this paper are the design guidelines and the 4 phase interaction framework for public displays: Ambient Display, Implicit Interaction, Subtle Interaction, and Personal Interaction.
This article primarily describes some first steps in creating ambient displays to facilitate awareness in work environments. Although the authors do not evaluate their work they do talk about some of the issues one encounters when building displays. Describing 3 zones of interaction:
* Ambient Zone
* Notification Zone
* Interactive Zone
They describe a process of the display "borrowing a display", the idea that other devices or people might want to borrow room on a display.
Streitz, N., Röcker, C., Prante, T., Stenzel, R., & Alphen, D. Situated interaction with ambient information: Facilitating awareness and communication in ubiquitous work environments, in Human-Centred Computing: Cognitive, Social, and Ergonomic Aspects. Lawrence Erlbaum. p. 133--137.
All in all this paper isn't all that great, other authors talk about zones of interaction -- though it is interesting to think about the difference between the information that can be transmitted using LEDs and large displays. The 'Bandwidth' of the display medium, if you will.
There is a much better follow up article to this at:
N. A. Streitz, Th. Prante, C. Röcker, D. van Alphen, C. Magerkurth, R. Stenzel, D. A. Plewe
Ambient Displays and Mobile Devices for the Creation of Social Architectural Spaces: Supporting informal communication and social awareness in organizations.
In: K. O’Hara, M. Perry, E. Churchill, D. Russell (Ed.): Public and Situated Displays: Social and Interactional Aspects of Shared Display Technologies, Kluwer Publishers, 2003. pp. 387-409http://ipsi.fraunhofer.de/ambiente/paper/2003/norbertfinal-24.7.03_nas.pdf
But, the take-aways are about the same.
]]> | View You can download this document here
We also set up a flickr account with all of the pictures taken during this project, you can view it here.]]>
This paper describes a semi-public display designed to support small group awareness. The authors discuss the advantages of scoping public displays for a small group, for example, small groups are more likely to have common interests and have a greater desire to remain aware of group member activities.
The author shared the public display space among 4 display modules: active portrait, attendance panel, reminders, and collaboration space. Reminders, mirrors help requests sent to the group listserv. The collaboration module links whiteboard space to help requests enabling lab users to make asynchronous comments on reminder system items. Active portrait provides a visualization of lab attendance using a group photo of lab members. Active portrait uses keyboard usage and instant messaging status to determine when users are in the lab, and slowly fades the photographs of lab members who haven’t been in the lab recently. Attendance panel is anonymous method for lab users to specify that they are attending events. Each event is represented as a flower, and lab users can change the state of a petal on the flower to represent whether they are attending an event or not. One can quickly glance at the ‘attendance flowers’ to determine if many lab users will be attending a specific event. Of these modules, attendance panel and reminder panel proved the most useful to lab users.
Huang, E. M. and E. D. Mynatt (2003). Semi-public displays for small, co-located groups. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, ACM Press.
This paper provides a useful emphasis on the difficulty of building displays for public spaces due to varying user interests, and hard to determine privacy constraints. The authors note that semi-public displays allow designers more easily understand their audience to build useful features. This also paper provides a nice cross section of example modules for a semi-public display; interestingly, the authors do not emphasize the importance of a modular public display. I can imagine how prospero could absorb some of the lessons from this study to build an adaptive public display, which changed its configuration based on the users surrounding it, and it’s situational context – providing benefits to both small and large groups.
This work in progress paper is not particularly insightful, but is a good tool for thinking about different ways that public displays can be interacted with. The authors describe Joe Blogg; a public display where users can contribute content by sending messages and images to it using their mobile phones. The apparent focus of Joe Blogg is asthetic, as the display is limited to the 3 most recently submitted photos, and the 3 most recently submitted SMS messages. By letting users submit content using SMS and MMS the system made it possible for people to send images to display regardless of their physical location – thus, it was possible for distal parties to influence the display’s content. The authors deployed the system in a lobby for one day, and were disappointed with the level of usage. It would be interesting to deploy their display in another space to better understand the role that sense of place plays in ones contribution to such a display. I can imagine that, there would have been more use if the system was deployed in an area where student milled around a lot, perhaps a lounge or break room.
Martin, K., A. Penn and L. Gavin (2006). Engaging with a situated display via picture messaging. CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Montreal, Quebec, Canada, ACM Press.
Takeaway: This paper introduces us to a few dynamics: Aesthetic Vs Function, Local Vs Distal, Text Vs Image Vs Movie, and Place. It would be interesting to deploy this system for a longer period of time to determine if it would be used at all – or how it would be used over time – as well as how the aforementioned dynamics play out over time. I can imagine that its level of activity would vary greatly by time of day, day-of-the-week, season of the year, etc. It would be interesting to examine such a system for the trends of use that may arise over time.
This paper describes the deployment of two proactive displays, AutoSpeakerID and Ticket2Talk, at an academic conference. AutoSpeakerID is a system that displays information about registered users who choose to ask a question after a presentation. For example, if I was a registered user of the system and chose to ask a question to the speaker, the display would show my name, Ben Congleton, and my affiliation, the University of Michigan. The second system deployed by the researchers was Ticket2Talk, T2T is similar to AutoSpeakerID, but is situated in a less formal space, and designed more to foster informal interactions among conference participants. For example, if a registered user was near a T2T display, the display would show their name, affiliation, picture, and a ‘ticket to talk’ (an image or URL that the user would pre-select on a topic that they wanted to talk about). The T2T system also maintained a history of recently displayed ‘tickets to talk’ and the user they were affiliated with. This provided people who were near the display with information about people who are in their environment, but who’s tickets were not ‘highlighted’ on the display.
The remainder of the paper discusses qualitative observations and survey response data collected during the system’s deployment. The authors found that both systems enhanced the feeling of community – this was mostly accomplished by helping conference attendees attach names to faces and affiliations, thus, improving awareness of people in one’s local social environment, but also the makeup of conference as a whole. The authors also discuss how the system managed privacy concerns and meshed with existing social practice. The authors found that by making conference attendees ‘jump through’ hoops to use the system, they mitigated privacy concerns by ensuring that users who made it through the registration process had bought into the system. They noted that while their system encountered problems meshing with existing social practice, it is highly probably that the novelty of the system affected some of these changes, and that this might not be a particularly valuable goal when attempting to augment an environment.
The authors conclude with some remarks about the benefits of providing awareness in social settings, and some observations about their proactive interaction model. Namely, a proactive interaction model is somewhat unfamiliar to the majority of users who are accustomed to direct interaction with the computation in their environment, as opposed to having the display ‘react’ to their presence in a more passive way. The authors conclude noting the importance of considering user privacy, methods for building social awareness, and noting the importance of exploring the design of ‘proactive interactions’.
McCarthy, J. F., D. W. McDonald, S. Soroczak, D. H. Nguyen and A. M. Rashid (2004). Augmenting the social space of an academic conference. Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. Chicago, Illinois, USA, ACM Press.
Takeaways: Most of the findings were anecdotal, and specific to the T2T and AutoSpeakerID system. However, the authors do contribute by providing some insight into how social awareness can be facilitated using two types of proactive display, and provide some evidence that the design of proactive displays should be an interesting area for exploration. At the very least, this is an interesting field study of proactive displays in use.
]]>This paper describes the design and deployment of Jukola, a system for democratic music selection in a public space. The authors emphasize the importance of music on structuring social action, mood, and ones sense of place. The Jukola system gives users in the environment power over their musical environment. Jukola consists of a touch screen where users can nominate songs to be added to rotation, a series of PDAs where users of the space can vote on the next song to be played, and a website where remote users can contribute music to be added the central music library. Their system is interesting, but their most valuable contributions are found in their discussion of the one week deployment of Jukola in a local hot spot.
One of this paper’s key contributions is its discussion of the problems associated with using collaborative filtering to automatically determine the right music an environment. The authors focus on the role that ‘choice’ plays in music select. It is quite possible that this concept of ‘choice’ also applies when attempting to build other systems to affect ones environment, thus, it is important that we as designers remain aware of what becomes lost when preferences are passively collected and used. In Jukola’s case value was provided not just by the democratic selection of music, but also by engagement in the music selection process. The authors also mentioned political issues that occurred when control of the music was transitioned from the bar staff to the entire environment, for example, one employee attempted to bypass the voting system to ensure their choices were played. Most of the anecdotal field study results are focus on small observations, such as how the Jukola PDA served to foster collaboration among users sharing the same table, and how democratic music selection created a shared sense of identity for the restaurant. The authors also noted how over time some users adopted strategic voting where they would select the best option that had a chance to win -- the lesser of two evils, as opposed to selecting their personal favorite. In short, their study provided a lot of insight into the social dynamics surrounding the Jukola system; however, their most valuable contribution comes in identifying a genre of situations where it becomes more important for users to engage with rather than merely passively influence their environment.
O'Hara, K., M. Lipson, M. Jansen, A. Unger, H. Jeffries and P. Macer (2004). Jukola: democratic music choice in a public space. Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques. Cambridge, MA, USA, ACM Press.
This paper provides a very interesting look at a system designed to promote democratic selection of music in a public place. The system is exceptionally interesting because A) It is democracy in a public place, B) it lets people select outside music, and C) the focus on letting people control their environment. If you were to replace 'modules' with 'music' in this scenario you'd pretty much have the basic idea behind Prospero. So the real question is, what's the difference between music and modules? Answer: A lot.
]]>They claim, curiously, that they are looking for people who "are not scared by a drunk young audience"!!
]]>The next step would be figuring out how to dynamically assign these module weights based on who has identified themselves to the machine.
In other news, I lowered the image cache for the flickr module, so now when it prioritizes people who are in the room, there will be less lag between identifying yourself and seeing the pictures you have selected.
This paper describes the deployment of the RoomWizard system. The RoomWizard (RW) is a system for managing conference room reservations. It consists of a web-based reservation management system, and a small Internet appliance with a touch screen display that is installed near the door of RW enabled conference rooms. The RW door mounted display provides information about the current user of the conference room, the current use of the room, the room’s daily schedule, and has peripheral LED lights that glow red or green based on the whether the conference room is available or not. RW users could reserve rooms in advance using a web-based room reservation system, and in situ for impromptu meetings using the RW’s touch screen.
The authors focus their discussion on how RW is different from other situated displays in that its use is highly tied to its location. For example, RW only displays information about room reservations for the room it is situated near. It does not provide information about other rooms that are available (though it would seem that some utility would be added by this functionality), or information about ongoing events. The design of the RW provides different levels of engagement, for example, peripheral LEDs let users determine if a room is available at a distance (unless the current reservation is not actually in use), closer inspection of the RW display lets users determine who is currently using the room, the time their reservation ends, and why the room is reserved. The authors note that by providing context information about ongoing meetings users of the system were able to determine whether a meeting was interruptible, and its general importance. The authors also spend a lot of time discussing how the system was flexible and did not force users to adhere to any specific rules. For example, when entering text fields into the system to specify meeting members and purpose, users were not forced to enter their name in a specific format, or choose a meeting purpose from a category. By letting users enter anything into these text boxes, users could use these fields to display information about the importance level of the meeting, whether it and its member’s were private (As opposed to just information about who was attending and the meeting’s purpose).
The authors do a wonderful job of providing insights into the usage of RW in the company they studied. Although most of their insight was into the deployment of RW situated in the specific company they observed, there were a few takeaways. First, it is essential to consider context of use and situation when deploying displays. Second, systems should be designed to be flexible like the social systems surrounding their use. Third, the nature of situated displays means that many users may encounter them at different distances with differing levels of engagement, it is important to design for these “zones” when building displays.
O'Hara, K., M. Perry and S. Lewis (2003). Social coordination around a situated display appliance. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA, ACM Press.
I'd put this in the top tier of the display papers I have read so far.
]]>The Bubble Badge (BB) is a wearable public display. This paper provides a brief overview of a prototype wearable public display, and then discusses some areas for future work. The BB project is not incredibly insightful, but it is one of the first papers to discuss the concept of a wearable public display. The authors describe BB as a small badge that is worn on one’s lapel, and a portable computer drives the content displayed on the small lapel display. The authors discuss how the BB has three dynamics: the wearer as the information provider, the viewer as information provider, and the environment as information provider. Each of these dynamics introduce interesting usage scenarios, for example, when the environment is the information provider the BB might display news updates broadcast wirelessly. There was really no more then a very short antidotal evaluation of the BB system.
There are two interesting features of this paper: A) public displays as a wearable device, and B) considering the role of information provider in the equation.
Falk, J. and S. Bjork (1999). The BubbleBadge: a wearable public display. CHI '99 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ACM Press.
I wish there was a simple way to embed an image into these blog posts. In fact for a blog on public displays there is a huge dearth of images. In any case, Bubble Badge is an interesting concept from 1999. (Yea there were public display ideas back then, too)
This paper describes the design, development, and implementation of the Notification Collage, a public designed to serve as a digital bulletin board and promote awareness between collocated and distal individuals. The notification collage, allowed users of a research lab to post notes, picture slide shows, web pages, movies and other content to a shared public display. The display was also used to display video of lab members who had webcams, thus users in the lab could see if their telecommuting lab mates were at their desks or not. Lab users who were not collocated and could not use the large shared display were able to view the contents of the shared display remotely using a client application. The client application was designed to run full screen on a peripheral monitor, or overlaid transparently on a user’s primary monitor.
The author’s focus their discussion on the role of environmental artifacts on awareness. For example, as previously mentioned the streaming video of users at their desks provided awareness information about distal users. Ephemeral slideshows, post-it notes, posted web pages, and activity logs served to provide personal content about each user, while providing context for Notification Collage inspired interactions. The authors also discuss 10 attributes of awareness, and which of these attributes can be supported through technology. Their discussion is largely antidotal, but insightful none the less, some of their comments are: people used the display for both synchronous and asynchronous interaction, some users felt there were privacy issues, artifacts posted on the display were normally self representative or used to initiate conversation, and the differences between one-to-one, overhead, & broadcast communication. They note that although the existing CSCW literature has touched upon the individual technologies used in their system, no other single system integrates these technologies in a form designed to foster awareness in small group settings.
The big takeaway from this paper is that information plays a role in awareness, and awareness can be provided by content on a public display. It is also important to understand how medium and context mediates how information is reached and reacted to.
Greenberg, S. and M. Rounding (2001). The notification collage: posting information to public and personal displays. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. Seattle, Washington, United States, ACM Press.
I don't know about you, but notification collage has always been one of my favorite HCI Systems. [I guess I am after all a Virginia Tech Notification Systems Lab Alumni]
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